Would rather stay away from Horton as well, his salary scale and concussion issues, and his prior motivation issues make him a risky pickup.

It's a pretty light UFA year though. Clowe, McArthur, Torres, Volpatti, Bickell, Clarkson would all be interesting at reasonable salaries up front, look at maybe Colby Armstrong in a reclaimation effort in a smaller move. But just really want to see them focus on adding some gritty, physical players. Don't much care about the size of Gagner/Hall/RNH/Eb/Yak, but the rest of the team needs a serious grit injection to be able to compete with a smaller top 6, especially moving to the new conference next year.

Centers are pretty non-existent in the UFA pool, mostly 4th liners and small/soft players. So they could make a push for Ott from buffalo or someone similar in that vein for the 3rd line center role on the trading market, but who knows what's out there.

Buyout Horcoff(effectiveness issue, not payroll)/Smyth(way too slow, not gonna retire), dump Hemsky to make room for new hires.

On defense, Streit, Scudari, and a resigned Mark Fistric might be ok, but they are either getting old, or fit the "bottom pairing" role that doesn't really help this team much. A trade is probably needed, but again it's difficult to gauge what's out there this far from the offseason.

Lots of elite goaltenders on the market, the Oilers should probably make a play for Miller or something and see what the price is. But I doubt they do anything but resign Khabby for a year or two and continue in their faith that Dubnyk is the man.